When you’re buying or selling a house, there’s a lot of communication and coordination among real estate agents, buyers, sellers, inspectors, lenders, and more. In such a complex environment, timely responses are crucial. But much of the high-stakes communication relies on traditional channels like emails and phone calls — which can easily get siloed and delay crucial updates, causing missed opportunities, miscommunication, and unnecessary stress.
This is where Wahi comes in. Wahi, a digital real estate company serving Canada, offers an end-to-end platform that gives homebuyers control and choice when it comes to buying and selling homes. Wahi is focused on bringing transparency to the journey and therefore empowers consumers with the knowledge — and confidence — they need to make the best, most informed decisions. Its suite of tools includes real-time property alerts, neighborhood data, market trends, and pricing insights, including historical sold data.
To move quickly with a lean workforce of 60, Wahi uses Slack to amplify collaboration and facilitate communication in the central, conversational work operating system. Wahi built a custom, AI-powered bot named Jean-Michel that complements real-life agents, taking action right from Slack to keep clients informed in real time and drive sales. “Once you get everyone in Slack, it makes everyone’s lives so much easier,” said Rishi Vaswani, Wahi’s Head of Product Delivery. “For the real estate industry, which has never used these kinds of tools before, Slack is a game changer. When people can interact quickly without needing to call or email, it saves time and helps us stay efficient.”
Using Slack also helps bring the industry’s less tech-savvy people on board. “There’s no learning curve or ramp-up time needed,” said Dan Miller, Wahi’s Head of Customer Success. “Slack is instant and intuitive, which is why it’s our operating hub.”
Anytime we need to focus, we start a Slack channel, message, or huddle to find the solution, eliminating the need for meetings and saving us so much time.
Centralizing work in Slack to save time and increase productivity
The Wahi app provides a seamless real estate experience for homebuyers, connecting clients remotely with Wahi’s in-house Realtors. When they’re ready, clients can also visit properties with Wahi’s tour assistants on the ground. Wahi pulls MLS listings and more from provinces including Ontario, British Columbia, Alberta, and Nova Scotia.
With hundreds of clients at any given time, Wahi’s Customer Success team uses Slack channels to stay agile. “If someone’s covering for another team member, or if a client wants to make an offer but their Realtor is off that day, we’re constantly communicating and coordinating,” said Miller.
This responsiveness is key to customer satisfaction. For example, when a client is ready to make an offer, the HubSpot integration immediately notifies the #realtor-team Slack channel, ensuring that Miller’s team can go where they’re needed most. “We can be very engaged with Slack,” he said. “If a client hits ‘yes’ to make an offer, we get a message in Slack and know exactly where to focus our efforts.”
For Lydia Ku, Wahi’s Head of Marketing for Campaigns and Customer Experience, a recent major project revolved around the launch of their co-buyer app, a home-hunting experience for couples that lets them communicate, track favorite listings, and schedule tours in one place. “To achieve success with our co-buyer app, we relied on Slack channels to keep collaboration focused and streamlined,” she said.
Even after the successful launch of our co-buyer app, we still get alerts in Slack when co-buyers are connected, allowing the team to continue to celebrate their hard work.
Boosting team alignment and reducing context switching
Slack plays a pivotal role in keeping projects, communications, and tasks centralized. With existing out-of-the-box integrations like Google Workspace and HubSpot integrated right into Slack, the team can collaborate across departments and projects. One of Wahi’s most used integrations is Asana, which allows the marketing team to receive alerts, see project statuses, and respond to comments.
On the engineering team, integrations help with key performance metrics like velocity and predictability. “If I propose a ship date, I want to meet that expectation,” said Rémi Flament, Wahi’s Head of Engineering and its first tech employee. One Slack channel per squad allows for real-time collaboration, with Jira tracking internal incidents and Datadog monitoring production stability. “When we get a comment or status change in Jira, it’s sent in Slack so people can follow what’s happening,” said Flament. To deploy frequently, they use GitLab. These integrations make it easy for Flament’s teams to stay aligned and resolve issues quickly.
In addition to project management, Wahi makes use of Slack huddles and canvases to have quick discussions and keep track of to-do lists and meeting notes. “If we need a good conversation, we’ll just hop in a huddle to get the ball rolling and save time,” said Vaswani. “I can open a canvas to take notes, add the people in the meeting, and boom, the conversation is instantly shared.”
With integrations, I can check on things, move them around, and plan ahead without ever leaving Slack. I can really focus on my work because everything I need is right in front of me.
Realtors and AI agents work together to deliver the best possible client experience
One of Wahi’s goals is to increase leads tenfold over the next year — without increasing headcount by the same margin. To do this, the team embraces automation and AI: They built their own custom AI bot, Jean-Michel, and deployed it in Slack to send real-time property updates, increasing the likelihood of happy clients and successful sales.
Jean-Michel uses RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) to seamlessly deliver time-sensitive details to Realtors and clients. For example, when someone makes an offer on a property one of Wahi’s clients has shown interest in, they want everyone to know right away. “Instead of relying on manual work, we leverage Jean-Michel to read the info as soon as it’s available, and then automatically deliver it to the Realtor-Client chat in the Wahi app,” said Flament. “All of this can only be achieved with Jean-Michel and Slack.” No waiting for a phone call or text. As soon as Wahi knows, the clients know, thanks to the ability of Jean-Michel to work seamlessly alongside human agents.
Flament stressed how much easier it was to build Jean-Michel than trying to teach real estate agents the complexities of technology and change management. “Even if it seems complicated, it was so easy for us to develop Jean-Michel in Slack,” he said. All an agent on the field needs to do is enter the shorthand for the property address, who needs to be notified, and the word “offer” in a Slack message — and then Jean-Michel takes care of the rest.
Jean-Michel is poised to do even more, such as providing suggested responses for human agents in Slack, further automating routine tasks, and improving response times. “Whatever we can do to automate things in Slack to really take action for us, we plan to develop in Jean-Michel or other AI bots in Slack,” Flament added.
Jean-Michel is an AI bot in Slack that helps us instantly notify clients as soon as an offer is made on a property they’ve viewed. It lets them know, ‘Hey, if you’re interested in this property, you’ll need to act fast.’
Streamlining work around the world and in the field with Slack Connect
As Wahi takes on more ambitious projects, seamless collaboration with external partners and vendors is essential. With Slack Connect, Wahi found a simple yet powerful way to work efficiently across teams and time zones. “We work with a lot of different partner companies, and they all have their own Slack workspaces. Slack Connect allows the right people to work together at the right time, saving us a lot of time,” said Vaswani.
When Ku first started in November 2022, she was charged with taking Wahi’s CMS migration across the finish line by December. “We worked with multiple companies and external partners all around the world, but Slack Connect made it possible to communicate and stay on top of everything,” Ku said. “This was such a big project with such a short timeline and we had to move fast, and Slack made it feel like we were all part of one team.”
Wahi also leverages Slack Connect to collaborate with independent contractors, who traditionally rely on texts, calls, and emails. “Everyone’s on Slack now, and they find it much easier than texting back and forth,” said Vaswani. Unlike texting, where group chats can be disrupted if some users are on Android instead of iOS, Slack allows seamless communication across devices. “The tour assistants who take clients to showings are on Slack channels organized into subdivisions, and that’s how we communicate,” said Vaswani.
Collaboration, communication, and teamwork in Slack is paramount to our success.
Celebrating team wins and scaling across Canada
With a distributed, mostly remote team operating in an industry that requires non-stop responsiveness, Wahi relies on Slack to keep employees connected, engaged, and efficient. “Culture plays an important role as we scale and attract new talent,” said Miller. “Slack helps us enable that.”
Wahi keeps the momentum high by celebrating every success. In the #wahi-shipped Slack channel, for example, everyone from sales to tech to external contractors shares what they ship each week. These moments of recognition boost morale and reinforce a sense of team achievement. Additionally, the #pr-at-wahi channel sends alerts whenever Wahi is mentioned in the media. “It’s really nice to see our brand authority and credibility build,” said Ku. “Everyone can visualize how all their hard work comes together.”
Integrations like Officevibe empower leaders to keep their pulse on employee engagement, collect feedback, and ensure that everyone’s voice is heard. “Slack really helps us foster a strong startup culture by making the workplace more fun and keeping everyone connected,” said Vaswani. To foster personal connections, they use a custom BirthdayBot and the Donut integration.
As Wahi’s team continues to grow and innovate, they’re not just focusing on expanding their reach but reshaping the real estate experience for both buyers and sellers. With the integration of AI like the Jean-Michel bot, Wahi is setting a new standard in the industry, automating processes and enhancing efficiency in unprecedented ways. This technological edge, combined with a strong, connected culture, are driving Wahi’s mission to become a household name in Canadian real estate.
